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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Social & political philosophy
Solidarity Beyond Borders is a collection on international ethics
by a multidisciplinary team of scholars from four continents. The
volume explores ethical and political dimensions of transnational
solidarity in the emerging multipolar world. Analyzing global
challenges of the world plagued by poverty, diseases, injustice,
inequality and environmental degradation, the contributors - rooted
in diverse cultures and ethical traditions - voice their support
for 'solidarity beyond borders'. Bringing to light both universally
shared ethical insights as well as the irreducible diversity of
ethical perceptions of particular problems helps the reader to
appreciate the chances and the challenges that the global community
- more interconnected and yet more ideologically fragmented than
ever before - faces in the coming decades. Solidarity Beyond
Borders exemplifies an innovative approach to the key issues of
global ethics which takes into account the processes of economic
globalization, leading to an ever deeper interdependence of peoples
and states, as well as the increasing cultural and ideological
fragmentation which characterize the emerging multipolar world
order.
Hegel's Philosophy of Right has long been recognized as the only
systematic alternative to the dominant social contract tradition in
modern political philosophy. Dean Moyar here takes on the difficult
task of reading and representing Hegel's view of justice with the
same kind of intuitive appeal that has made social contract theory,
with its voluntary consent and assignment of rights and privileges,
such an attractive model. Moyar argues that Hegelian justice
depends on a proper understanding of Hegel's theory of value and on
the model of life through which the overall conception of value,
the Good, is operationalized. Closely examining key episodes in
Phenomenology of Spirit and the entire Philosophy of Right, Moyar
shows how Hegel develops his account of justice through an
inferentialist method whereby the content of right unfolds into
increasingly thick normative structures. He asserts that the theory
of value that Hegel develops in tandem with the account of right
relies on a productive unity of self-consciousness and life, of
pure thinking and the natural drives. Moyar argues that Hegel's
expressive account of the free will enables him to theorize rights
not simply as abstract claims, but rather as realizations of value
in social contexts of mutual recognition. Moyar shows that Hegel's
account of justice is a living system of institutions centered on a
close relation of the economic and political spheres and on an
understanding of the law as developing through practices of public
reason. Moyar defends Hegel's metaphysics of the State as an
account of the sovereignty of the Good, and he shows why Hegel
thought that philosophy needs to offer an account of world history
and reformed religion to buttress the modern social order.
Gandhi and Philosophy presents a breakthrough in philosophy by
foregrounding modern and scientific elements in Gandhi's thought,
animating the dazzling materialist concepts in his writings and
opening philosophy to the new frontier of nihilism. This
scintillating work breaks with the history of Gandhi scholarship,
removing him from the postcolonial and Hindu-nationalist axis and
disclosing him to be the enemy that the philosopher dreads and
needs. Naming the congealing systematicity of Gandhi's thoughts
with the Kantian term hypophysics, Mohan and Dwivedi develop his
ideas through a process of reason that awakens the possibilities of
concepts beyond the territorial determination of philosophical
traditions. The creation of the new method of criticalisation - the
augmentation of critique - brings Gandhi's system to its exterior
and release. It shows the points of intersection and infiltration
between Gandhian concepts and such issues as will, truth, violence,
law, anarchy, value, politics and metaphysics and compels us to
imagine Gandhi's thought anew.
Climate Engineering: A Normative Perspective takes as its subject a
prospective policy response to the urgent problem of climate
change, one previously considered taboo. Climate engineering, the
"deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment
in order to counteract anthropogenic climate change," encapsulates
a wide array of technological proposals. Daniel Edward Callies here
focuses on one proposal currently being researched-stratospheric
aerosol injection-which would spray aerosol particles into the
upper atmosphere to thus reflect a small portion of incoming
sunlight and slightly cool the globe. This book asks important
questions that should guide moral and political discussions of
geoengineering. Does engaging in such research lead us towards
inexorable deployment? Could this research draw us away from the
more important tasks of mitigation and adaptation? Should we avoid
risky interventions in the climate system altogether? What would
legitimate governance of this technology look like? What would
constitute a just distribution of the benefits and burdens
associated with stratospheric aerosol injection? Who ought to be
included in the decision-making process? Callies offers a normative
perspective on these and other questions related to engineering the
climate, ultimately arguing for research and regulation guided by
norms of legitimacy, distributive justice, and procedural justice.
Rhetoric, Humor, and the Public Sphere: From Socrates to Stephen
Colbert investigates classical and contemporary understandings of
satire, parody, and irony, and how these genres function within a
deliberative democracy. Elizabeth Benacka examines the rhetorical
history, theorization, and practice of humor spanning from ancient
Greece and Rome to the contemporary United States. In particular,
this book focuses on the contemporary work of Stephen Colbert and
his parody of a conservative media pundit, analyzing how his humor
took place in front of an uninitiated audience and ridiculed a
variety of problems and controversies threatening American
democracy. Ultimately, Benacka emphasizes the importance of humor
as a discourse capable of calling forth a group of engaged citizens
and a source of civic education in contemporary society.
This volume traces the topic of affect across Lyotard's corpus and
accounts for Lyotard's crucial and original contribution to the
thinking of affect. Highlighting the importance of affect in
Lyotard's philosophy, this work offers a unique contribution to
both affect theory and the reception of Lyotard. Affect indeed
traverses Lyotard's philosophical corpus in various ways and under
various names: "figure" or "the figural" in Discourse, Figure,
"unbound intensities" in his "libidinal" writings, "the feeling of
the differend" in The Differend, "affect" and "infantia" in his
later writings. Across the span of his work, Lyotard insisted on
the intractability of affect, on what he would later call the
"differend" between affect and articulation. The singular awakening
of sensibility, affect both traverses and escapes articulation,
discourse, and representation. Lyotard devoted much of his
attention to the analysis of this traversal of affect in and
through articulation, its transpositions, translations, and
transfers. This volume explores Lyotard's account of affect as it
traverses the different fields encompassed by his writings
(philosophy, the visual arts, the performing arts, literature,
music, politics, psychoanalysis as well as technology and
post-human studies).
Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince remains an influential book more
than five centuries after he wrote his timeless classic. However,
the political philosophy expressed by Machiavelli in his tome is
often misunderstood. Although he thought humans to be rational,
self-interested creatures, and even though he proposed an approach
to politics in which the ends justify the means, Machiavelli was
not, as some have argued, simply "a teacher of evil." The Prince's
many ancient and medieval examples, while relevant to sixteenth
century readers, are lost on most of today's students of
Machiavelli. Examples from modern films and television programs,
which are more familiar and understandable to contemporary readers,
provide a better way to accurately teach Machiavelli's lessons.
Indeed, modern media, such as Breaking Bad, The Godfather, The
Walking Dead, Charlie Wilson's War, House of Cards, Argo, and The
Departed, are replete with illustrations that teach Machiavelli's
critical principles, including the need to caress or annihilate,
learning "how not to be good," why it is better to be feared than
loved, and how to act as both the lion and the fox. Modern media
are used in this book to exemplify the tactics Machiavelli
advocated and to comprehensively demonstrate that Machiavelli
intended for government actors and those exercising power in other
contexts to fight for a greater good and strive to achieve glory.
What is the point of living? If we are all going to die anyway, if
nothing will remain of whatever we achieve in this life, why should
we bother trying to achieve anything in the first place? Can we be
mortal and still live a meaningful life? Questions such as these
have been asked for a long time, but nobody has found a conclusive
answer yet. The connection between death and meaning, however, has
taken centre stage in the philosophical and literary work of some
of the world's greatest writers: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy,
Soren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, Herman Melville, Friedrich
Nietzsche, William James, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Marcel Proust, and
Albert Camus. This book explores their ideas, weaving a rich
tapestry of concepts, voices and images, helping the reader to
understand the concerns at the heart of those writers' work and
uncovering common themes and stark contrasts in their understanding
of what kind of world we live in and what really matters in life.
In a world riven with conflict, violence and war, this book
proposes a philosophical defense of pacifism. It argues that there
is a moral presumption against war and unless that presumption is
defeated, war is unjustified. Leading philosopher of nonviolence
Robert Holmes contends that neither just war theory nor the
rationales for recent wars (Vietnam, the Gulf War, the Iraq and
Afghanistan Wars) defeat that presumption, hence that war in the
modern world is morally unjustified. A detailed, comprehensive and
elegantly argued text which guides both students and scholars
through the main debates (Just War Theory and double effect to name
a few) clearly but without oversimplifying the complexities of the
issues or historical examples.
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